In the past two months, nearly 3.3 million remote exams have been conducted in U.P. without letting students cheat. This has been made possible by the state government’s partnership with Wheebox, an AI-powered assessments startup that enables institutions to conduct cheat-proof assessment at scale.

 Early this year, even the Delhi government had revealed plans to use Artificial Intelligence and game-based techniques for continuous assessment of students under it’s the newly formed Delhi Board of School Education (DBSE). This had sprung out of the need to ensure a personalised learning experience for each student and to create a system where each of them is regularly evaluated on the basis of their strengths.

Even in the corporate sector, AI is a part of many candidate and employee psychometric assessments. This can range from realistic chatbot-type conversations with candidates in situational judgment tests (SJT) to proven algorithm-based decisions made from analysing candidate responses to test questions. The use of AI in assessment now regularly informs HR and talent decisions.

The sway to AI 

The first move to AI in assessments came around in the 1990s when computers replaced  paper-based versions of tests, enabling automated scoring and computer-generated interpretive reports. This was an early example of technology taking on some routine tasks and using algorithms to produce a candidate report. AI is now being used to generate unique test questions on the fly and also in tests that make use of adaptive scoring.

The shift has been consolidated in the wake of the global lockdowns pushing all teaching and assessment to virtual modes. While the conduct of fair online assessments has been the biggest challenge to the learning pathway, AI-powered Remote Proctoring has paved the way for detecting and preventing cheating during online exams. There are different parameters, such as audio proctoring, video proctoring, image proctoring, monitoring screen of the end-user attempting the online exam; these mechanisms combine to create a secure, controlled and cheat-free environment for the conduct of remote exams.

Reassessing the assessments methodology

Whether it for educational institutes or for corporate hiring, AI integration brings to the table some unique benefits that are not afforded by traditional means.

The first in the list is the added efficiency and precision with which AI can analyse massive amounts of data, far more than any human. The increased power of today’s computers means more candidate data can be precisely evaluated in shorter amounts of time. 

Secondly, AI challenges the human biases and stereotypes that often creep in during the evaluation process. In an education scenario, it leads to unfair markings whereas it can amount to poor selection decisions for companies. This trust, however, can only be established if the programming of the AI system has been done in an objective way. If the data fed into the algorithm is biased to begin with, it will always throw up skewed results. 

Finally, in an era where the biggest of all sins is to be in close proximity of one another, it is AI that enables socially-distanced yet reliable evaluation methods without compromising the sanctity of the assessment process. By combining various aspects, such as Robotic process automation, Machine learning, Pattern matching, Natural language processing etc., AI has a key role to play in analysing and interpreting vast amounts of candidate data.